Fatima Is About Love and Peace

Special from the Fatima Center
August 28, 2013

Our Lady’s visitations to Fatima manifest the love She has for mankind. It is a revelation of Her Motherly care for Her children.

A mother is concerned for the well-being of her little ones. She sees they are nourished, educated and directed in goodness. She works to preserve them from all harm, even in spite of themselves.

This was the loving communication given by Our Lady of Fatima in 1917. She came as an Ambassador of God with a message of warning, of love, of hope, and a promise of peace.

She told us that man must cease offending God “Who is already too much offended”. She was so rapturously lovely that young Jacinta, one of the three children to whom Our Lady appeared, would often exclaim: “Oh, what a beautiful Lady. What a beautiful, beautiful Lady.”

It is a central aspect of all salvation history that God will rebuke man for his sins. In our time, Our Lady gives us this warning at Fatima because God does not wish to punish, but to rescue. He does not want to see us chastised, but converted back to Him. God wishes that all will be saved “and come to the knowledge of the truth” (I Timothy 2:4). He does not chastise us suddenly. He first invites us to amend our ways.

Our Lady’s goodness was also revealed in the changed lives of the three children to whom She appeared — Jacinta, Francisco and Lucia.

Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of this change is the children’s sudden, valiant selflessness. We know that self-centeredness is a sign of immaturity; that small children are inadvertently selfish, and that the process of maturity involves growing from this self-centeredness into a concern for others — the ability to sacrifice for the good of another, the ability to put others before ourselves.

We usually do not associate such selflessness with nine-year-olds; yet Jacinta, as well as the other two Fatima children, became consumed with the desire to make reparation for sinners, to console Our Lord Who is too much offended, to fast, to endure ridicule, to dramatic acts of self-denial.

The children did all this not for sake of boasting an exaggerated piety. Rather, it was performed with utmost purity of intention. It was a manifestation of heroic virtue.

Further, Our Lady did not simply ask for prayers and penance to maintain a status quo that simply avoids punishment. She offered us a promise that is way beyond what we deserve — the promise of a period of peace to mankind if Her requests are granted.

This promise of peace is unprecedented in human history. If Her requests are obeyed, we no longer send our sons off to war; we will not have the gang violence that is rampant in our time; there will be no concentration camps or gulags where innocent people are consigned to unspeakable suffering and death; school shootings will be a thing of the past.

This is the Fatima Message we promote: an urgent message of goodness, love and peace; a message of a heavenly Mother who loves us more than we can imagine, and who graces us with an announcement of warning and hope.

And this is the purpose of our Fatima: The Path to Peace! conference: to be co-workers with Our Lady in promoting Her message and in urging others to take it seriously.

On October 13, 1917, Our Lady confirmed Her words with the spectacular Miracle of the Sun worked before 70,000 people. She said for three consecutive months prior to the prodigy, “In October I will perform a Miracle so that all will believe”.

Again, showing Her goodness, She did not simply demand people to believe the three young children on their word alone, but performed the most spectacular prodigy in human history to demonstrate the veracity of Her message.

Pope John Paul II said, “The Message of Fatima imposes an obligation on the Church.” It is our goal to make this beautiful message better known so that God will be glorified, chastisement averted, and a period of peace granted to all mankind.